Lawrence of Arabia

Page 40

Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) was the second of five illegitimate sons born to Sir Thomas Chapman, Bt. and his mistress, Sarah Junner. They lived as a family after adopting the surname of Sara’s mother. T. E. Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Oxford and then became an archaeologist working in the Middle East before the First World War. After war broke out, his knowledge of the language and peoples of Arabia led him to become part of the Arab Bureau intelligence unit in Cairo. From there he became a liaison officer to the Emir Feisal, who was leading the forces of his father the Sharif of Mecca in the Arab Revolt against Turkish rule. After the war, Lawrence agreed to work at the Colonial Office as an adviser to Winston Churchill from 1921 to 1922. The two men remained good friends until Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident. Churchill memorialized his comrade in his collection of essays Great Contemporaries (1937), as seen in this extract.

Part of the secret of this stimulating ascendancy lay of course in his disdain for most of the prizes, the pleasures and comforts of life. The world naturally looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank or even power and fame. The world feels, not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action; a being readily capable of violent revolt or supreme sacrifice, a man, solitary, austere, to whom existence is no more than a duty, yet a duty to be faithfully discharged. He was indeed a dweller upon the mountain tops where the air is cold, crisp and rarefied, and where the view on clear days commands all the Kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.

Finest Hour 196